Cloudforester
by wavesparkle7217
Summary: The anxious and painfully honest memoirs of a teifling born in an isolated and forgotten jungle above the world. The story of how he entered the world of others. Please R&R!
1. Cloudforester

Okay, disclaimer: I didn't make up teiflings, elves, or the other DnD races, but my characters are my own. I love them, and they are mine, and kidnapping is bad!

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The Cloudforest is a jungle forever cloaked in fog. The world is green and gray, wet and dim from the mist that surrounds all the world. The trees are tall and the ground is alive with verdant plant growth and every kind of creature imaginable. Dew is a way of life in the mystery-shrouded Cloudforest. The world sparkles like diamonds, and when misty rain falls, life is cool and shadowy.

There are secrets in the shadows of the clouds. Soft, indistinct beasts move like dreams through the riotous growth. The mist muffles all the sounds, and a world full of life becomes as solitary as unrequited love. Each bush, each bough, each leaf hides an intruder in the lonely life of the Cloudforest.

Family does not matter. The Cloudforest is a solitary place, and it harbors a unfrequented life for those born into the rushing stillness of a place time has forgotten. A beast is born, and shortly after the pain is gone, lost.

This is the world I was born into. Despite all of the life, it is hard to eat. To eat, one must disturb another, and that is the most difficult thing in the world to a Cloudforester. Surrounded by life I could have eaten, I nearly starved to death. I am not like others. I look different, and I am willing to kill. Still, the utter solemn lonesomeness of my world seemed to steal things away from my grasp. I would reach toward a fruit to find it was farther away that it had been.

My salvation came in the form of white, pointed men. They had silver hair and eyes, and they wore many cloth leaves on their bodies. They came in a group, unlike even the tribesmen who drove me away from their waterfalls and villages. I was terrified at first.

Figures parted the curtain of concealing mist with hands like moonbeams. They wore metals and gems such as I had never seen. They were strange, so strange, and they had lumps of cloth and food on their backs. They did not carry spears, but I let the mist hide me anyway.

I have seen myself in pools of water. I know I look different from any of the other things in the world. I have a naked, forked tail and bone horns protruding from my skull. My feet are cloven hooves, and my eyes are a dull, glowing red. In other respects I am like a fog-colored man. The silver elves, as I found they were called, told me I am a teifling. They also told me that I am evil and not to be trusted.

I have always been told this. The tribe drove me out for it, and the animals avoid me like a plague when they happen across me in the lonesomeness. I know I am not evil, but I am untrustworthy. I do not always tell myself the truth. I deny reality when it does not suit me. I take what I need, and I am sure my conscience is stunted and ugly inside me. I disturb people. I emit an aura of wrongness more distressing than the eternal secret life of the fog that bore us. I have said all life is forever alone in the Cloudforest. I lied. I am the only one who the Forest takes things away from. I am the only thing in this forest as wrong as the murk, and the clouds themselves make my life harder. They know I am just _wrong_.

These elves, they were terrified of me. Sometimes I am as well. I remember I once happened upon a pane of metal in the jungle and saw myself for the first time. A skulking, tall and gangly horned and tailed creature hidden by his gray skin in the mist, only his red eyes glowing like ill-luck coals.

Lo and behold this is what the elves saw and took in to care for. One old male, he took me to a fire and fed me raw meat. I would have liked to cook it, but perhaps that would offend him. I now know it was an insult, and in the matter of uneducated, barbarian folk, I fell right into the "stupid" stereotype.

I was kind, shy, and polite, though, and soon he began to call me a name. I had been accepted.

"Mourn," the silver one said one night as we lay in a hotpool so choked with steam only my eyes permeated it. "Do you want to come with me out of this abysmal forest?"

I thought for a moment. Loneliness and the solitary world of clouds was all I had known until I met him. I liked belonging, even though I did not truly belong. The silver one had given me food, a home, pretty copper carvings quickly turning green like the rest of the moist and dripping Cloudforest, and a name. I had to go with him. "Yes, Lord," I replied, for I had never learned his name, and I never would.

"Good," he told me. "We will leave in the morning."


	2. Mist and Elves

I looked up at the gray cloth sky and I felt the soft cloth pad beneath my prone and tense form. The silver one called this unnatural place a tent, and he said I would get used to sleeping in it. I did not think so. The fabric was worse for seeing sneakers than even the dense murky fog of night. I could not even see the faded glow of the moon above me. The silver one had asked me how old I was. I said I was one hundred and fifty-two moon-cycles fog-born. He deciphered my odd notation with a twist of his wrinkled brow, then he told me I was twelve years and eight months old.

I must have fallen asleep eventually, because the stifling heat of tent-morning woke me. I felt like I was drowning in leaves and I thrashed my way out, panicked. The silver Lord had taken his things and packed them on a frame. He swung over and lashed the loaded frame to my back. I ate a little of the hard, dried meat he gave me, and then he began to walk toward the rest of his tribe. I followed, struggling under the heavy and uncomfortable pack-frame. It already dug into the skin of my hips and was beginning to rub my shoulders raw and bloody.

The elves sang and talked merrily ahead of me, but even had I been asked to try and understand the strange chatterings they made, I could not have answered for panting and sweat.

In the mist and greenery my life consisted of, I had never been as far as we went that day. The silver ones made their "camp" with tents and beds of canvas to keep out the wet, and the chests on the horses full of what ever they were carrying guarded by half-orcs armed to the teeth.

My Lord made a fire, and told me to put my pack in the tent. I did, and I came and sat by the warm glow of the flames leaping for the moon. They burned away the fog, and left in its place a stinging smoke that concealed bits of spark and ash. It followed me ceaselessly, cloaking me in its cruel and acrid scent so my eyes hurt and ran.

I slept deeply even in the confines of the tent and covered in the smoke-smell. When I awoke, my body screamed at me not to abuse it any further, but my Lord was already up and had his things packed. I moved against the will of my poor muscles and raw flesh. I have done nothing harder than when I put the back-frame on that second day. It rubbed salty sweat into the open wounds it had opened the day before, and my hips and shoulders burned like fire.

Tears ran down my gray cheeks as I gnawed at the trail rations I was given for breakfast. One thing the Cloudforest teaches is that there is no use in complaining. You are the only one that will hear you, and you already know your own pain and troubles. What use can be moans if only the unhearing fog can take heed? I would help myself, because there were no gods to intervene.

This second day, I learned the second agony of travel. With my body on fire with pain already, I did not see the trees and the moss change. But oh did my knees! The joint that held my body above the wet and unfeeling mud screamed in protest at a descent I only now noticed.

_Stop! Stop!_ cried my body as my mind pushed forward with each punishing step. We reached a stream and I collapsed beside it, drinking deeply as the stern mist swirled the laughter of the silver ones around my spinning head.

My mind called forth images of the derisive laughter of the pierced noses of the tribes. Their eyes danced a dance of scorn as their spears dug into my flesh. I stood again, and blind with the exhaustion of at last having something worthwhile in my life, I followed the trail down again.

I have never slept so well. I have never eaten so much in my life as the kind elves gave me that night. Their eyes danced with pride at an insurmountable challenge surmounted. The youngest elf, one with spring eyes and moon-white teeth, reached into my pack and pulled out the lead weights he had placed there that morning.

In the dawn of the day the mist let me go, I sat with the other silver ones, and I learned their names. My Lord did not tell me his, but the one that had put the lead rocks in my pack was Nym. He was the youngest of the elven party sent to bring the dwarven gold-wares back to the king of the moon elves.

Nym was beside me as we walked out of the Cloudforest and into the broad, grassy slopes of the mountain at large. I was one of them now, and the mist swirled in my past, the void of its absence well filled by the music of my new home.


End file.
